Chapter 3: QB

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Finally, we get an encrypted message burst: a flight plan update. We're to fly past the biggest island.

My wingmates are to engage any resistance we encounter. Radio silence set. Stealth set. And I'm to drop the payload if we get within 5 kilometres of the island.

My onboard director changes directive. I have no option but to follow these orders.

I optically flash confirmation of message receipt to my wingmates, and we break close formation flight to scatter out into a ragged V wing pattern. Like we practiced. To make it harder to take down all of us with ordnance or missiles or just stray friendly fire.

I flash "match speed" to my wingmates, and set my engines to just shy of the sound barrier. It's time for an attack run. Stealth with speed. What we're apparently designed for.

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It doesn't take much flight time before the first weirdness happens. My wingmate closest to the island reports engine trouble.

They abruptly slow down, and quickly fall behind even the ragged, scattered V wing pattern we're flying. I query status and I get status unknown.

I keep an eye on them in the part of my mind's eye that contains their friend-or-foe signature overlaid on my passive radar and lidar scan of the area.

I get one more final flashed message before they spiral into the ocean. Engine overheat. Cooling systems overload.

Is this enemy action? I curse the limits of the optical messaging system for what I suspect won't be the first time this flight.

If I had any time to mourn, I would, as my wingmates are the closest I have to friends, family - a vague impression I have, of something that mattered to me once, something that was scarce, something emotion tinged. Sad and happy. Fear and anger.

But I know I have no choice - I can't dwell on this. It's fly or die.

I consider relaying my wingmate's final message to mission control. But radio silence is still set. Our onboard directors give us no option but to press on.

--

Barely 20 seconds pass, and another wingmate reports engine trouble, and also drops back. If I could yell or scream or do anything but fly on, I would. The intellectual terror I feel has no outlet.

I try to engage my training. There’s no doubt now – this must be an enemy weapon system. But what?

I flash evasive maneuvers to my three remaining wingmates. We start dodging.

I feel more than detect something happen to my starboard engine. A sudden hesitation.

The temperature gauge spikes. Huh. Is it some sort of beam weapon? It must have just glanced me.

The simulations we did covered the possibility of it, but, there wasn't much we could do about it.

Our frames are coated the way they are for optical camoflague to minimise the risk of being targeted, not for reflecting energy weapons.

So all we can do - all we could figure out from the simulations - was to just keep dodging, and fly as erratically to the target. And try not to slow down.

I flash "speed up" and "match speed" to my remaining wingmates, and push my engines harder. We cross the sound barrier, four supersonic darts with a visceral need for speed.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

--

We cross some invisible threshold, and suddenly – noise, on all radio frequencies. Presumably trying to jam any remote control link we might have or ability to report back home.

And the air is filled with fast moving objects. Invisible to radar, barely visible on lidar. My forward camera can just discern the line of tracer flashes. Anti-aircraft artillery.

The intent of that is clear too - make us steer around the path of these in a predictable fashion, and then make ourselves a target for that invisible beam weapon. It hits me that I'm the wingleader precisely because of this. I'm not only best at dodging, but at thinking quickly.

Can I figure this out? I don't know. I silently wish my inevitable successor better luck than we've had, since this is an impossible problem.

We have no choice but to not react, and hope for the best. I flash "maintain course" "evasive manueavuers" and hope my wingmates understand my intent.

We fly through the cloud of fast-moving material, elevons and ailerons flapping randomly. With a half-remembered urge to beg a higher power for luck - did I ever really believe? Did I ever have a faith, a diety, a God like what I heard about so much from the radio around home? I don't remember.

If I could tell mission control anything, I doubt they'd be able to reply. I doubt they'd be able to help.

--

We lose another wingmate. Rage and grief and fear all fight for a way out. For relief. But there's none coming.

We've been joined in the air by barrages of missiles. Seeking. Homing. Bending their paths towards us.

This feels desperate on the behalf of the people we've come to bomb. This we've trained for. I flash "deploy chaff" to my wingmates, and release glittering confetti.

A half-formed memory tugs at me. Feelings of envy? Celebration? No, nothing to celebrate here. Nothing to envy. Not yet.

An innovation I figured out during training crosses my mind - I set weapons locks on the missiles. Adding IR noise to a busy environment confuses machines, sometimes confuses wingmates. Even beyond optical chaff.

I flash "target lock" and coordinates to my remaining wingmates. I'd grin if I could. Maybe there is something to celebrate here. If we get through this.

I open up with my close-in weapon systems on missiles that get too close. We might have a chance.

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I'm alone now. One wingmate gone in a blink, a missile I couldn't catch catching them instead.

My last remaining wingmate took anti-aircraft fire to their starboard-side wing, and is falling behind. I wish them well.

My onboard director notices I've crossed the effective minimum distance threshold for the nuclear warhead I'm carrying. My current directive changes to 'deploy payload'. Every second I spend close to the ground becomes intensely painful.

And as much as I might have curiosity about them? The enemy beneath me – the people I’m about to bomb? They’re nothing to me - just like home is nothing to me but another abstract curiosity.

I have no choice in what comes next, whatever my feelings. I know that the onboard director could detonate the warhead right now, if I don't follow its demands. But there's some logic, some calculus for trying to keep me alive to return me to base. I guess I'm expensive.

I strain my engines to the maximum throttle, and pass Mach 2. I climb as fast as I can, doing the payload delivery loop we were trained to do. My internal altimeter ticks over 2000 metres, and I'm flying as close to vertically as my engines can manage. I arc backwards, starting to fly upside down.

The onboard director releases my payload at the top of my arc. It - the nuclear bomb, the warhead, my reason for being - flies off. Inertia carrying it higher, in a pretty parabola.

The onboard director immediately drops the directive to fly vertically, replacing it with an urgent fear of the local area. It doesn't have to tell me twice. I know what'll happen next.

I'm in the blast radius for the megaton-class warhead I'm carrying. The simulation runs made that perfectly clear. I complete the loop, and start to level out.

But then one of those invisible beams glances my chassis for just long enough. The temperature gauge on my port engine - already redlining from the high-speed climb - spikes into danger territory. I have no choice but to cut throttle to avoid an overheat and... I slow down. At the worst possible time.

I'm not going to make it to safe distance. I strain my engines as hard as I can, without causing them to further overheat, or set me into a spin. Hoping against hope. Praying to a deity I don't remember the name of that it's enough.

It's not. Behind me, the warhead detonates on an altitude-determined delay. I sense more than see the surge of electromagnetic radiation from the detonation as it overwhelm my sensors.

My carefully Faraday-caged processing core - my brain - doesn't skip a beat, the optical relays of my construction designed to keep operating in these harsh conditions. But some other part of me reaches some critical threshold and cuts out. My ability to sense the outside world winks out.

--

I've barely rebooted my internal senses as seconds later, the blast wave hits me, and my port-side wing snaps from the ferocity of it. It feels like I've broken a leg, an internal sense of a body I don't remember the shape of. I curse the cruelty and attention to detail of the builders who put me together like this.

I tumble, now powerless to resist the Mach speed winds. I would be sick if I had a mouth, a stomach, anything but a fuel tank and a fuel gauge in their place. If I had eyes to close - I would close them. If I wasn't still blinded by the electromagnetic pulse of the detonation, too close, too loud.

I'm done for. I dump my personal logs to the orange-coloured 'black box' that sits inside my processing core. Maybe, just maybe, something of me will survive this way.

The ocean rushes up to meet me.